Preston Pub Festival 2024

Bright, cheerful celebrations in town I seem to always forget about. Not anymore.

The people of Preston love their town. They love their markets—yes, plural!—and their ever-growing vibrant food scene. They are proud of their pubs, and they are keen for you to visit them. Perhaps that’s why Preston Pub Fest was created then, not just to have a grand old pub crawl, but to entice people to visit, to get more people talking about Preston.

The thing about Preston is, I used to come here to buy school shoes as a kid, and to visit my first boyfriend at college. I don’t know what he did there, he worked at a scrapyard. I didn’t like it much. It was grey and damp, just like Lancaster, which I also didn’t like much. You don’t like many things when you’re a teenager. Maybe KFC and Richmond Superkings. So it’s taken some time for Preston’s first and second impressions to wear off, and I’ve spent my life sort-of appreciating the vibrancy of its food and drink businesses from afar—I visit my friends at Plug & Taps occasionally, I sometimes make plans to travel in for coffee and shopping and never end up doing it. It’s not the easiest place to get to for me, I always said.

I was wrong, because currently a £2 bus takes me there in under an hour. It was Tom’s idea: there was going to be a pub festival. Should we go?

As the map shows, (sorry I can’t add links, I’m using the janky web editor on my phone) fourteen pubs and bars across town were joining in, from the Victoriana-trad Black Horse to the shiny holiday vibes of Bar Pintxos. You might also want to keep hold of this map for your next visit to Preston. Wink.

Our first stop was for coffee, and we hit the jackpot at the market where we found Jonah’s. Third wave coffee even I could get on board with. The batch brew (my standard order) burst with raspberries and honey. We chatted for a while, Tom nerded out about beans, and then it was time to get to the good stuff.

After Jonah’s we stomped straight to Plug & Taps. It was already busy, and we saw familiar faces right away. I had a beer blended with Ortega grapes that was beautiful, all limes and sour sweeties, and, of course, an Augustiner Helles. I love Plug & Taps, it’s the sort of pub I’d love to run, full of smiling faces and tons of taps pouring perfect beers. We stayed much longer than we meant to catching up with Ben the Bar Manager, so our next couple of pubs were scratched off the list and we darted directly to Bar Pintxos.

Look at that classic Spanish bar. You’d believe you were in San Sebastian. The only thing missing is a leg of ham—and that’s only out of shot because delicious salty slivers of it are being shaved onto a plate for my lunch. Bar Pintxos is an approximation of a dream to me. Okay, without the beer festival extras that had been brought in, the beers offering is lager or lager (not a problem for me, just saying), but the cocktail menu had kalimotxo and tinto verano on it. Hallelujah! An Iberian place that gets it!

Our little pintxos you can see here are freshly baked Spanish bread, pork cheek, and pan con tomate. There is also a little salt cod croqueta too. All were completely delicious, and I can’t wait to go back.

After we ate our delectable morsels, Tom said someone was joining us “as a surprise”. Our secret guest shows up moments later—our mate Judson, homebrewer turned brewer, who apparently saw one of Tom’s beer photos and thought, “I want a bit of that.” We all headed off to Chainhouse Brewing Co. tap room, which for me was a first time visit. Shamefully. As I said, I always seem to find reasons not to go to Preston. Manchester is *just there*. But here is my friend’s tap room, not an hour away by bus, and I’d never been before. I’m a disgrace.

Anyway. The place was packed. We found space on a classic oktoberfest bench and drank freshly brewed NEIPAs. It was amazing to see it so busy here, a wonderful insight into how well Chainhouse has been embraced by Preston, a town I wrongly assumed was into either older pubs or Aperol spritz dispensaries. That people were willing to stand in an archway taproom just to be there speaks volumes. In Clitheroe we sometimes couldn’t get people to stay in our bar because the table by the window was taken.

Preston impressed me. I found it visibly unchanged in parts from when I was almost a toddler, with some of the shopping streets and shopping centres still rocking their 1980s/1970s signage (FAO. Ray). There were sections that felt noticeably new though, contemporary in how they were being used, like the market, which still had jumble sale tables out under a Victorian roof, but also had glass cube buildings housing The Orchard pub, Jonah’s, and many other small, independent businesses. It’s possible to walk down a shopping street and see only closed units and vape shops, but round the corner will be leafy seating areas for restaurants and bars like Bar Pintxos. Like anywhere in the north, Preston had been left to rot for a long time. But tired with this long, drawn-out fate, local entrepeneurs and business owners, creatives and makers seemed to decide, nah, I’m not having this. Preston deserves better. We deserve better. I felt a huge wave of positivity in every place we visited, held buoyant by the people crowding the bar and laughing at their tables. You might not call it a boom time for Preston, but there’s never been a better time to visit. And that’s coming from me.